Brothers & Sisters - Charlotte Wood [88]
‘Nez. Nez! Come over here. Quick.’
The river water was the colour of weak tea and shimmered in the light. I stripped down to my underpants, ran across a muddy bank and plunged in. Nez wouldn’t come all the way in. She took off her jeans and T-shirt, folded them neatly into a ball and sat them on a rock along with her camera. She walked slowly down to the water’s edge and splashed around in the shallows in her undies and singlet while I swam.
Between swims I skipped stones across the surface of the water while Nez watched me from a rock she was perched on. Her job was to count the skips of the stones I threw in my attempt to break what I’d announced to her as the ‘World Freshwater Tor Skipping Championship’.
‘What’s a tor, Jesse?’ she asked, scratching the tip of her nose.
‘It’s a killer marble. An assassin. It’s the prize you’ve got to capture if you’re to have any chance of winning the game. Otherwise it will take you out. It’s like the king in chess.’
She looked at the stone gripped between my fingers. ‘A marble is round,’ she said. ‘The ones you’re throwing are flat. They’re not tors.’
‘They are. At least this one will be. When I break the record, it will be this stone that clinches it for me.’
‘But it won’t be yours, Jesse. The stone will be at the bottom of the river somewhere.’
‘Well, Nez, when you want something bad enough, there’s a price to pay. Always.’
I threw my arm back, pitched the stone and watched as it skimmed across the water.
‘Seven . . . eight . . . nine . . . ten . . . that’s a new record, Jesse,’ Nez squealed, clapping her hands together.
She picked up the camera and pointed it at me. ‘Let me take a picture of the world champion.’
Although I wouldn’t pose for her she took the picture anyway.
My arm was sore from all the throwing. I sat down next to Nez and poked at the bed of mud beneath my feet with the sharp end of a twig as our bodies dried in the sun. She’d taken her shoes off. I could see that she had mud caked between her toes.
I tapped her on the calf with my big toe. ‘You’d better clean those feet before Gwen gets back. She won’t want you putting that mud all over the back seat of the car.’
She wiggled her toes. One or two clumps of mud fell to the ground. She took the twig from me and started drawing something in the mud. It was a house.
‘When will she, when will . . . Mum be back?’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Soon I hope. I’m starving. She’d better have something for us to eat.’
I dragged my foot across the rock and again tapped her on the side of the leg. ‘And don’t call her Mum, Nez. You know she don’t like it.’
‘But she is my mum. And she’s your mum too, stupid.’
She finished drawing the house. She was now onto a girl, maybe a self-portrait?
‘Yeah, I know she is. But you’re wasting your time calling her that. She’ll just ignore you. You know that. You might as well whistle her like a dog that doesn’t want to come home.’
‘But I like it, calling her Mum.’
‘Well, she don’t. Makes her feel old, she says. Makes her angry too. So don’t do it. She’ll be in a shitty mood already, and I don’t want her starting on us.’
Nez ignored me as she busied herself with another drawing and whispered, ‘Mum, Mum, Mum’ under her breath. She drew another person, standing next to the house. I had no idea who it was.
When she had finished drawing Nez tossed the twig away and climbed up onto the rock. ‘There’s just one shot left in the camera. Will you take a picture of me?’
All the snooping around and swimming had made us hungry. We got dressed and walked back to the car, where we ate about six packets of biscuits each. My favourites were the Scotch Fingers, while Nez liked the Monte Carlos, so we did some swapping.
I munched on my last biscuit and looked across to the wheat silo. It had a metal staircase wrapped around the outside. I looked up at the sky and back down to